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Review: Neal Cassady - Culture - International Herald Tribune

Neal Cassady. The Fast Life of a Beat Hero. By David Sandison and Graham Vickers. Illustrated. 340 pages. $24.95. Chicago Review Press.

In 1948, Allen Ginsberg's father wrote him a two-word letter: "Exorcise Neal." Neal was Neal Cassady, who Ginsberg senior feared was leading his already unstable son farther down the road to perdition. Raised on Denver's skid row, Cassady met Ginsberg and other members of the forming Beat circle in New York in 1946, after driving East in a stolen car with his 16-year-old bride, LuAnne Henderson, and a purse full of money taken from her relatives. By the age of 21, Cassady boasted of 500 vehicle thefts. He served several terms in prison, including a two-year stretch for drug dealing in the late 1950s, shortly after the publication of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," in which he features as Dean Moriarty.

After separating from LuAnne, Cassady married Carolyn Robinson, the eventual author of an engaging memoir, "Off the Road" (1990), and since Cassady's death in 1968 a keeper of the flame. An alternative keeper, that is - for while Kerouac revered the "holy con man" and Ginsberg desired him as the ideal lover, Carolyn sees a thwarted family man, a sick reveler unfitted by circumstance to accept the only true medicine, love. Throughout their married life, which lasted from 1948 until she filed for divorce in 1963, Carolyn was effectively writing notes to her husband reading "Exorcise Neal." When "On the Road" appeared in 1957, a reviewer in Time magazine diagnosed Kerouac's hero as suffering from "a prison psychosis that is a variety of the Ganser syndrome," according to which "the patient exaggerates his mood and feelings; he 'lets himself go' and gets himself into highly emotional states." In "Neal Cassady," David Sandison and Graham Vickers describe their subject as a charismatic sociopath, which seems as precise a label as any. They also see Cassady as a "folk hero." Vickers, who completed the biography after Sandison's death in 2004, regards him as "a uniquely creative mind that somehow managed to change the course of American literature by proxy." The claim is not exaggerated, assuming one recognizes Kerouac's influence on postwar writing. Kerouac never hesitated to identify Cassady as his mentor, not only through his personality but also by theoretical precept. In a letter of 1948, Cassady set out the ideas that would alter Kerouac's practice (until then shaped by early-20th-century realists): "I have always held that when one writes, one should forget all rules, literary styles, and other such pretensions... Rather, I think one should write, as nearly as possible, as if he were the first person on earth." He himself was incapable of the difficult job of writing without reference to stylistic models while keeping the reader's interest, but Kerouac proved to be.

A full-scale biography of the maddest of the "mad ones" that Kerouac extolled in "On the Road" seems like a good idea. Carolyn's presence is much to the fore in "Neal Cassady," where she is thanked for her "unstinting help." The biographers are hardly to be blamed for making the most of it, but the result is that the character who dashes through their pages is at once overfamiliar, from her superhumanly forgiving account and Kerouac's worshipful one, and underdeveloped. The stories of his arrival in New York, the first meetings with the Ginsberg circle at Columbia, the cross-continental harum-scarum with Sal Paradise and Marylou (as Kerouac and LuAnne are called in "On the Road"), need reconditioning if they are to be made to run again.

In the early days, Cassady had ambitions to write, but a rudimentary education compounded by an inability to concentrate on tasks requiring sustained effort meant his attempts (mostly fragments of autobiography, collected in 1971 as "The First Third") lack refinement - even the refinement required to make them read "raw" - and structure. Cassady understood this, while others did not. Never shy of placing himself and his buddies among the greats, Kerouac would compare Neal to Dostoyevsky, Wolfe and Dreiser. When Ginsberg indulged in similar boosterism, it brought a response that provides one of the more moving passages in Sandison and Vickers's book: "I wrote for a month straight - what came out? Terrible, awful, stupid, stupid trash. ? If I can't write one good sentence in a month of continuous effort - then, obviously, I can't realize, or express."

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By the time Cassady took the wheel of Ken Kesey's Magic Bus in the mid-1960s, any remaining self-restraint had been smoked or popped to pieces. The destination panel at the front of the bus said simply "Further." As the authors put it: "This psychically disturbed vehicle would need a driver. It was the role for which Neal Cassady was both practically and spiritually predestined." Through it all, Carolyn kept faith in the idea that, at heart, Neal was happiest when earning an honest living and providing for his family. Even after their divorce, she continued to pray that he would recognize the blessings of the quiet life. He tried, only to be possessed by the other Neal - the "Dean" Neal, by then an only-just-living legend - the moment he left her sight.

Sandison and Vickers describe one of the final struggles between these conflicting spirits. Hopeful that he might be rehired by a railroad company, he set off, "promising to come back that evening a rehired railroad man." Weeks later, two of his children found him at the wheel of the Magic Bus in San Francisco, where he admitted that he had never tried to return to the railroad and "went on to confuse his daughter Jami with a friend of hers, upsetting her considerably," and then offered the young group marijuana.

Cassady dropped dead in Mexico just days short of his 42nd birthday. The ashes were the subject of squabbles, first between Carolyn and "a wild-looking hippie girl" and then with Diana Hansen, to whom Neal had got hitched in 1950, while still married to Carolyn. She called repeatedly, requesting a portion. Carolyn resisted at first, but then "sent Diana some ashes, with love."